Posted on Tuesday, October 07 2003 @ 23:14 CEST by Thomas De MaesschalckThe cooling method originally developed by a few mechanical engineers from Standford University will be able to cool chips like CPUs and graphics chips. It was succesfully modeled and protytyped in cooperation with companies like Intel, AMD, Apple and DARPA :
The Intel test produced the highest performance Intel had ever seen from any cooling technology.Here is more information about their new quiet and efficient cooling technology :
The small size, light weight, and excellent thermal performance of the Cooligy system allow tighter packing of components on the circuit board and higher reliability of individual chips as well as the entire system. By contrast, large finned heat sinks are heavy, and their mechanical leverage can crack a CPU or circuit board if a system is dropped during shipping.
The next generation of microprocessors, the semiconductor “brains” of computers, not only produce higher overall temperatures but also create one or more concentrated hot spots of particularly high heat on the chip. These hot spots, typically found above areas where the most amount of work is performed on the chip, must be kept to within a specified temperature to ensure high-performance and reliability. Traditional means of cooling these chips, such as heat sinks, fan sinks and heat pipes, require a large mass of metal to passively absorb and spread the heat to aircooled fins. These passive technologies cannot effectively cool the hot spots produced in next generation microprocessors.
Cooligy’s Active Micro-Channel Cooling technology utilizes highly efficient means to absorb heat from the chip’s hot spots and quickly dissipate it to keep the chip cool. The Cooligy cooling system employs a heat collector fabricated from a thin layer of micro-machined silicon that fits on top of a microprocessor package. A very dense area of Micro-Channels etched into the silicon enables fluid to circulate through the heat collector and efficiently absorb and take away heat. Cooligy’s system has been shown to effectively cool microprocessor hotspots of up to 1000 watts per square centimeter.
The Cooligy approach also employs a new, innovative solid-state Electro-Kinetic pump. The Electro-Kinetic pump circulates the fluid in the cooling system through the Micro-Channel heat collector and to the heat radiator that transfers the heat to air. With no moving parts to wear out, this noiseless pump—the first of its kind—is small, cost-effective and highly reliable for long-term use.
Although some form of fluid cooling has existed for the most sophisticated computer systems during the past four decades, none have provided the precision, reliability or cost effectiveness needed to cool the hot spots of the next generation of microprocessors. Cooligy’s Active Micro- Channel Cooling and its innovative solid-state Electro-Kinetic pump is the first solution to solve the difficult cooling challenge presented by intense hot spots in future chips. The company will begin supplying qualification systems to computer systems developers and manufacturers later this year.
